1980 Week: Urban Cowboy

          Part character study, part cultural exploration, part epic romance, and part musical, Urban Cowboy is s strange movie. On some levels, it’s as serious and thoughtful as any of the other fine films that James Bridges directed. And yet on other levels, it’s very much a corporate product—one can feel the hand of producer Irving Azoff, the manager of the Eagles, in the way the film stretches out during musical sequences, the better to showcase tunes featured on the picture’s soundtrack album. Even the presence of star John Travolta in the leading role reflects the film’s identity crisis. He plays a good-ol’-boy type from Texas, even though Travolta is unquestionably a product of his real-life New Jersey upbringing. This egregious miscasting makes sense whenever the movie drifts into a dance sequence, since audiences loved seeing Travolta move in Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Grease (1978). Yet about halfway through its storyline, the movie shifts from domestic drama and dance scenes to a mano-a-mano duel involving two men testing their mettle while riding a mechanical bull. Why hire a dancer if dancing’s ultimately not that important to the role?

          Anyway, the convoluted story beings when Bud Davis (Travolta) relocates from his hometown to the city of Pasadena, Texas, near Houston. Bud’s kindly uncle, Bob (Barry Corbin), takes Bud to a gigantic honky-tonk called Gilley’s, where Bud meets the spirited Sissy (Debra Winger). The two commence a tumultuous relationship that culminates in marriage, estrangement, and separation while Bud starts his career working at a refinery alongside Bob. Concurrently, Gilley’s adds the mechanical bull, which becomes a metaphor representing the stages of the Bud/Sissy relationship. His initial mastery of the bull impresses Sissy, but his subsequent obsession with the machine causes friction. Later, when Sissy decides she wants to try the bull, Bud’s objections represent his inability to respect her. And when Bud squares off against Wes (Scott Glenn), an ex-con who conquers the bull and becomes Sissy’s lover while she’s separated from Bud, the mechanical bull becomes the stage for a climactic battle. Rest assured, the story feels exactly as disjointed and episodic as the preceding synopsis makes it sound, because there’s also a subplot about Bud’s affair with a pretty heiress, Pam (Madolyn Smith).

          The funny thing is that despite its unruly narrative, Urban Cowboy is quite watchable. Bridges and cinematographer Reynaldo Villalbos give the picture a moody look by borrowing from the Alan Pakula/Gordon Willis playbook. Glenn and Winger give impassioned performances, effectively illustrating the way id rules the decision-making of people with limited formal education. And Travolta tries his damndest to make his hodgepodge characterization work, using intensity to power through any scene that he can’t energize with skill alone. Furthermore, the honky-tonk atmosphere is intoxicating, at least for a while, because watching acts ranging from the Charlie Daniels Band to Bonnie Raitt rip it up on the Gilley’s stage is as fun as watching cowboys and cowgirls brawl and dance and drink. The movie also makes effective use of two theme songs that became pop hits, Johnny Lee’s “Lookin’ for Love” and Boz Scaggs’ “Look What You’ve Done to Me.”

          Most surprising of all, however, is the abundant ugliness in Urban Cowboy. Men treat women horribly in this picture, and women respond by using their wiles to drive men insane. Some of this gets to be a bit much (notably Winger’s eroticized calisthenics while riding the mechanical bull), but there’s something believable about the way the characters play out romantic drama that’s suited for the lyrics of a great country song.

Urban Cowboy: FUNKY

The Boy in the Plastic Bubble (1976)

          A sentimental favorite of many ’70s kids, this made-for-TV bummer fictionalizes the real-life experiences of two young men who were born without functioning immune systems, and were thus forced to spend their lives inside containment chambers. (The storyline features a single composite character.) Much of the picture’s appeal can be attributed to the participation of leading man John Travlota, who was already a small-screen heartthrob thanks to Welcome Back, Kotter; in fact, just a year after this movie was broadcast, Travolta made the leap to big-screen stardom with Saturday Night Fever. Seeing the virile Travolta reduced to emasculating captivity amplifies the movie’s themes of frustration and isolation, and it’s a safe bet millions of young ’70s girls wept during scenes of Travolta’s character suffering anguish because of his unique condition.

          The movie begins with a middle-class couple, Johnny Lubitch (Robert Reed) and Mickey Lubitch (Diana Hyland), celebrating the birth of a son—only to be told by their kindhearted physician, Dr. Gunther (Ralph Bellamy), that young Tod can’t leave his “plastic bubble” until a cure for his ailment is found. After some maudlin scenes of the Lubitches learning to connect with their child, plus a choking incident in which the infant nearly dies, the film cuts to Tod’s adolescence, when Travolta takes over the role. Living in an elaborate enclosure that’s akin to a Habitrail, Tod longs to be with other kids, especially his pretty next-door neighbor, Gina (Glynis O’Connor). He gets his wish, sort of, when he’s supplied with an airtight spacesuit that allows Tod to attend high school. Alas, his desire to breathe free air remains unsatisfied, so the question of how long Tod can suppress life-threatening urges creates a blunt sort of dramatic tension.

          Produced by prolific hacks Aaron Spelling and Leonard Goldberg, and directed by crowd-pleaser Randal Kleiser, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble is absurdly manipulative, a low-budget weepie built around a character who demonstrates saintly personal character. Yes, Tod talks about masturbating and he’s a wiseass during homeroom, but he’s essentially a lonely soul desperate for human contact. As a result, only the anger in Travolta’s performance keeps the piece from being totally saccharine—yet once the movie reaches its fanciful ending, any pretense to dramatic credibility gives way to melodramatic excess. Beyond its iffy virtues as a narrative, however, The Boy in the Plastic Bubble is beloved for its ’70s kitsch factor, from Travolta’s meticulously blowdried hairstyle to the casting of Brady Bunch dad Reed as Tod’s papa. Trivia buffs also note the significance of this project in Travolta’s life—Bubble helmer Kleiser subsequently directed Travolta in Grease (1978), and Travolta embarked on a love affair with costar Hyland, several years his senior, until her death from cancer in 1977.

The Boy in the Plastic Bubble: FUNKY

Moment by Moment (1978)

Although performer Lily Tomlin and writer Jane Wagner have been a formidable creative team for decades, creating top-rated TV specials and Tony-winning stage productions, whatever magic they normally conjure together is absent from Moment by Moment, Wagner’s sole outing as a feature-film auteur. Starring Tomlin as an existentially adrift Malibu divorcee and John Travolta as the soulful young drifter who brings her loins back to life, the movie isn’t so much awful as indifferent. Though impeccable from a technical standpoint, the film is flat in every other regard, from acting to dialogue to staging; Moment by Moment feels like a rehearsal instead of an actual movie. There’s also the significant issue of Tomlin and Travolta lacking anything resembling chemistry—no matter how many times Tomlin plops onto Travolta and slides her hands down his pants, it’s difficult to believe these two people want to sleep with each other, much less connect on a deeper level. This isn’t because Tomlin is gay in real life (she and Wagner were already a couple by the time they made Moment by Moment), but because the actors give lifeless performances. In their meager defense, few performers could overcome limp lines like, “You seem so withdrawn, like you’re not even there,” which Tomlin actually says to Travolta at one point. What’s more, the storyline itself is so obvious, shallow, and unconvincing that it almost parodies itself. Thus, in trying to portray sensitivity, Travolta comes across as a girly-man on the verge of weeping in almost every scene, while Tomlin sounds robotic issuing trite observations. (Another gem: “I don’t even know what the word ‘love’ means anymore. I don’t know what cheap sex is.”) The film’s effort to seem heartfelt gets so arch that in one scene, Dan Hill’s infamous wimp-rock ballad “Sometimes When We Touch” plays in the background. Watching this pointless endeavor grind along, one can only wonder what potential Wagner and the actors saw in the material, because in its final form, Moment by Moment is 102 moments of attractive, star-driven nothing.

Moment by Moment: LAME

The Devil’s Rain (1975)

          Ernest Borgnine as a bug-eyed Satanist, complete with ram’s horns and a shaggy fright wig. Bit player John Travolta as a victim of supernatural forces, his eyes weeping blood and his face melting away. A shirtless William Shatner crucified, upside-down, in a church defiled by Satan worshippers. All this and more can be yours for the price of admission to The Devil’s Rain, a perpetual contender for the title of Worst Movie Ever Made, and therefore cinematic catnip for masochistic viewers. Directed by cult-fave Brit Robert Fuest, who cleverly blended camp and horror in The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and therefore should have known better, The Devil’s Rain makes the fatal mistake of taking itself seriously. So even though Fuest’s innate artistry gives a few scenes visual grandiosity, The Devil’s Rain is dull and sluggish, and only the scenes of shameless scenery-chewer Shatner getting tortured achieve campy bliss.

          The big problems are the unnecessarily convoluted story and the lackluster production design. The backstory of the picture has something to do with a cult of Satanists who populate a ghost town in the American Southwest, performing human sacrifices in order to gain immortality or power or whatever; the current story depicts a family rebelling against the Satanists’ oppression, which leads Mark Preston (Shatner) to confront the bad guys. Not the smartest move. For reasons that strain credibility, Mark’s mom (Ida Lupino) owns a book that’s mystically connected to the Satanists’ power, so head villain Jonathan Corbis (Ernest Borgnine) tries to exchange Mark’s life for the book. However Mark’s brother, Tom (Tom Skerritt), will have none of this, so he storms into town with a shotgun hoping to rescue his sibling. Also drawn into the overcooked mix are a local doctor (Sam Richards) and a local sheriff (Kennan Wynn).

          One might assume that The Devil’s Rain zips along with this much plot crammed into 86 minutes, but that’s not the case. Instead, the movie lumbers slowly because the filmmakers favor lengthy setpieces like people melting to death in what appears to be real time. Furthermore, the picture’s ghost-town sets are cheap and sparse, the shocker moments are so clumsy and obvious that tension never builds, and stiff acting by nearly the entire cast gives every scene a leaden quality.

          Through normally an energetic asset to any picture, Borgnine is a weak link, because he’s miscast as an aristocratic character in the classical mold—he looks ridiculous spouting verbose curses in monster drag. Even solid actors Lupino and Skerritt are hamstrung by the goofy goings-on. Only Shatner gets into the spirit of the thing, dropping to his knees and flailing and shouting like he’s playing grand opera—or at least Grand Guignol. Accordingly, the fact that he’s only in the movie for a total of about twenty minutes is a shortcoming.

          Still, there’s no denying that The Devil’s Rain comprises 86 of the weirdest minutes in ’70s cinema, even though it’s more of a slow-moving unnatural disaster than a high-speed train wreck. And as for the poster's claim that the flick features “absolutely the most incredible ending of any motion picture ever”? Let’s just say you can’t blame the hypesters who sold The Devil’s Rain for trying.

The Devil’s Rain: FREAKY

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

          Saturday Night Fever is more than just the movie with John Travolta wearing a white suit and dancing to the music of the Bee Gees. It’s also an insightful study of ambition and desperation, and a gritty depiction of life in the working-class neighborhoods of New York City. So while the storyline is melodramatic and some of the musical sequences go on too long, Travolta’s performance is one of the most iconic acting turns of the ’70s, and the movie is filled with moments that have become ingrained into the texture of cinema history. Norman Wexler adapted the script from a New York magazine article titled “Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night,” which, ironically, author Nik Cohn later admitted he fabricated, so it’s not as if Saturday Night Fever has any claim to factual accuracy; what the movie offers instead is a palpable sense that its relatable characters are obsessed with scoring on the dancefloor as a means of escaping what they perceive as the suffocating confines of “normal” life.

          Travolta stars as Tony Manero, a twentysomething paint-store drone whose life is headed straight to blue-collar mediocrity except for when he unleashes his prodigious talent for disco dancing. On the multicolored floor of the Odyssey nightclub, he’s a god. Tony’s abilities draw him into a fractious relationship with an ambitious female counterpart, Stephanie (Karen Lynn Gorney), and he’s fascinated by the fact that she’s even better at putting on big-city airs than he is, so he studies with her to improve his dance technique, to polish his faux refinement, and to make time with her in order to prove his Neanderthal manhood. Watching dim-bulb Tony realize that there’s more to life than pretending to be a big shot is compelling, and the subplot depicting Tony’s abusive treatment of a simple neighborhood girl (Donna Pescow) adds dark colors to the characterization. The sequences depicting Tony and his buddies prowling for women are especially vivid, with the streetwise dudes spewing foul-mouthed boasts and indulging impulses so primal that they’re forever walking the line between big talk and big, violent action.

           Travolta gives his career-best performance, matching youthful swagger with genuine pathos, and he’s credible even when the movie gets overwrought. However it’s the dance scenes that make the film legendary, and for the most part they don’t disappoint; director John Badham’s exciting visual contributions include the up-and-down camera moves that follow Travolta’s every gyration during his show-stopping routine set to “You Should Be Dancing.” For the whole Saturday Night Fever experience, by the way, avoid the truncated PG-rated version that Paramount released in 1978 so younger viewers could see the movie, because only the R-rated original has the full impact.

Saturday Night Fever: RIGHT ON

Grease (1978)

          The ’50s-themed musical Grease never piqued my curiosity back in the day, so it wasn’t until 2011 that I finally watched the thing start to finish, having seen only tiny excerpts previously. And though the following remark is useless as film criticism, the only fair assessment I can offer is that I don’t get what the fuss is about. Grease was gigantic hit in 1978, and it remains so eternally popular that sing-along screenings are regularly held at world-class venues including the Hollywood Bowl. That’s not even mentioning the considerable staying power of the stage musical upon which the film is based, which is a perennial favorite in community theater and high school productions. So while I can easily identify some of the pop-culture factors that contributed to the movie’s success—the ’50s nostalgia boom that began with American Graffiti (1973), the ascendance of leading man John Travolta, who scored a career-making hit with Saturday Night Fever (1977) the year before Grease was released—I don’t see anything in the actual content of the movie that screams “all-time classic.”
          In fact, several gigantic flaws seem more glaringly obvious to me than the movie’s limited charms. The actors playing teenagers at all-American Rydell High are too old for their roles (leading lady Olivia Newton-John was almost 30 when she shot the picture), the storyline is suffocatingly sexist (she wins Travolta’s heart by proving she can dress like a slut!), and the celebrated soundtrack is schizophrenic, because the mock-’50s tunes from the original stage show are complemented by an anachronistic country-pop ballad (“Hopelessly Devoted to You”) and an even more anachronistic disco thumper (the Barry Gibb-penned title song). Furthermore, the jokes are juvenile, the story is a pastiche of ’50s clichés like soda-fountain food fights and hot-rod drag races, the choreography is uninspired and crudely filmed, and the music production is sloppy, with most of the tracks suffering from poor mixes in which vocals are amped up way too highly.
          On the plus side, the central opposites-attract romance between a good girl who’s secretly naughty and a greaser who’s secretly decent has universal appeal, Travolta’s dancing is terrific, and the whole thing is served up with such an overdose of sugar-coated exuberance that its eagerness to please is appealing in a desperate, puppy-dog sort of way. (The insidiously catchy climactic number, “You’re the One That I Want,” epitomizes the chirpy vibe.) But when all of these disparate elements unspool one after another, Grease feels like a sloppy rough draft. Tangents including the downbeat Rizzo subplot (Stockard Channing plays a loose woman who goes all the way with a bad boy, then faces the consequences) dissipate the clarity and impact of the main romantic storyline, and extended dance numbers like “Greased Lightning” and “Born to Hand Jive” lack the ironic wit of stronger tunes like “Beauty School Drop-Out” and “Look at Me I’m Sandra Dee.” So while a few things in Grease work the way they should, close inspection reveals that they don’t, to quote one of the movie’s famous songs, “go together.”

Grease: FUNKY